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user-inactivated · 3658 days ago · link · · parent · post: How “omnipotent” hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years—and were found at last.
The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. I will likely never, ever recycle any hard drive again. Or any digital device for that matter.One of the Equation Group's malware platforms, for instance, rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers—a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate.